Nothing fails like success

William Cash

And lastly, William' said the inter- viewer, 'if I may, I would like to ask about Your writing methods.'

No, I am not having a fantasy about being interviewed for the Paris Review. I refer to a perfectly serious question I was asked by Frank Delaney, host of Sky's Book Programme, shortly before lunch last Friday.

I took a sip of studio water and nodded awkwardly. A camera turned towards me. 'Can you describe your working environ- ment?' he continued in his soft Irish accent. 'Do you write in long-hand or on screen?'

There was an awkward pause. No, I thought to myself, this is not a joke. This is not a wind-up. This is a first. Somebody is actually taking me seriously as an author.

'I write on a computer because I can't read my own handwriting', I said. 'I work nut of my Hollywood bedroom because I have no money. I used to have an office downstairs — but I've had to rent it out'.

And so on.

On 28 October, my first book was pub- lished, Educating William: Memoirs of a Hollywood Correspondent. It is the story of a young hack's progress from Wapping to the West Coast, where I worked for the Times — and a story that seems to have Upset a good number of my journalistic col- leagues. With a few exceptions, critics have been reviewing (savaging — to be more exact) my personality — or my dust-jacket Photograph (viz the Independent and Evening Standard) — rather than my prose. The rumpus proper began on Radio Four's Start the Week, when Melvyn Bragg seemed to take my suggestion that the British media were star-struck by Holly- wood, bouncing up and down like a troupe of teenage cheer-leaders, strangely person- ally. He accused me of being a pious, suck- Up hypocrite for attempting to ingratiate myself with the very celebrity circus whom I attack. He later sniffed that I was 'a com- plete celebrity groupie'. A bit rich, that, Melvyn.

The most caustic example was a profile in the Sunday Times Style section — taking Lip a page of a knee-jerk spot usually reserved for pop-stars or royal hairdressers. Despite being called a 'pen in the arse', and depicted as a patronising, upper-class 'elitist' who 'looks down his nose at other

reporters' and 'over your shoulder at par- ties' (untrue), this was — naturally -- all very flattering.

But I did, I have to say, begin to worry about this a bit — until Anthony Sampson tapped me on the shoulder at a recent party. It had been acting on his advice, given a few years back after a bibulous Cambridge literary society dinner, that I had gone out to LA as a foreign correspon- dent. 'If there is any advice I can give you,' he had said to the assembled two dozen dinner-jacketed undergraduates, all of us with finals looming, 'get a job as far away from London as possible. Apart from any- thing else, people will always think you are having a better time than they are'.

'There's something I must warn you about', he said to me now.

'What's that?'

'When a 27-year-old journalist writes a book like yours, he will be on the receiving end of some very jealous-minded hostility. In London, you are not allowed to be a young journalist and write a successful book'.

That is not quite true, of course. There are plenty of examples of hacks graduating to being 'authors' without incurring any of the acid-tipped obloquy that has come my way. The real problem is that you are not supposed to have too much fun in the writ- ing of one's opus - it should, ideally, be a respectable biography, a brave and serious account of time spent in a hell-hole like Bosnia or Beirut, a history of London, or -- better still -- an anthology. In London' Kingdom of Letters, you are not really meant to smile. If you are a journalist, and want to be taken seriously as a writer, here are some thoughts from the stretcher. The most obvious is to give up journalism altogether. As Norman Mailer once said, 'The secret of good journalism is knowing when to get out'. Your worst enemies are your hack friends (especially if they are bald and small). Example. my friend, Toby Young, editor of the Modem Review polite- ly described me in the Sunday Times as 'a Pythonesque parody of an upper-class twit'. Rather that, perhaps, than a jealous middle-class shit.

Further examples are legion. A few days before the launch party for my book, for example, I was told by Emma Soames, edi- tor of ES Magazine, that they wanted to do a piece related to my book launch, and the Cash family. They hired a smart young photographer. Everybody — including half the staff of ES — seemed to have a good time. A few days after the party my mother got a call from the rather sheepish sound- ing Standard hack who had been commis- sioned to do the piece, saying that it had to be spiked — on whose orders I have no idea — 'because I was getting too much publicity'.

Sampson is right of course. The real — and unspoken — problem with writing about Los Angeles, for many of today's New Guard of media critics is that, to bor- row a line, it has become the irresistible destination of those who insist on being where things are happening. Like it or not, movie-talk — serious movie-talk that is — is probably the most earnestly discussed topic of conversation between Oxbridge young hacks. For one of their number, to venture into the jungle, and not turn native is almost unforgiveable.

Perhaps the biggest mistake I made was to end my inside dust-jacket blurb with the line, 'He lives in the Hollywood Hills and is writing a novel set in LA'. After the Start the Week broadcast, as we sat around chat- ting and eating croissants, almost the first question Melvyn Bragg asked me was, `So, William. How are you getting on with your novel?' When I said that I hadn't actually started it, he almost beamed with delight. `So when's the novel coming out?' I was asked by the Sunday Times hack. There was a sense of almost profound relief when I said I had no idea.

Will Self should probably count himself lucky that he was not a Fleet Street hack before launching his fiction career. Had Donna Tartt been, say, a style writer on Elle whilst writing The Secret History, I sus- pect she would not have secured quite so much lavish attention. Different rules seem to apply to literary hacks, who have a way of looking after each other when their first novels are published. I was astounded the other day, whilst having dinner with a friend whose first book is due out soon, when he rattled off the list of 'friendly' crit- ics he had already secured to review his book.

'You mean you actually choose who reviews your book?' I said aghast.

'Of course,' he said. 'You approach the critics. Have lunch with them or something. And they fix it up with the lit eds.'

Oh well. All that remains is for me to thank all those who have attacked me for giving me so many column yards of gener- ous publicity.

William Cash is now American Correspon- dent At Large for the Daily Mail.